The Heart Never Lies
by blakesheart
Summary: People have secrets they hide, even from themselves.. It's 1964. Snow is falling heavily, causing chaos on the roads. Leaving Dr. James Baldwin to deliver his wife's twins with his own hands, with only one nurse with him to help. A night that will change his life forever.
1. Chapter 1

**March 1964.**

* * *

The snow started to fall several hours before her labour began. A few flakes first, in the grey afternoon sky, and then wind-driven swirls around the edges of their wide front porch. He stood by her side at the window, watching the sharp gusts of snow outside, all around the neighborhood lights flicker on, and the naked branches of the trees turn white.

After dinner he built a fire, venturing out into the harsh weather for the logs he had piled against the side of the garage from the previous autumn. The kindling in the iron gate caught fire immediately once he sat to light it, cross-legged, adding logs and watching the flames leap, blue-edged and hypnotic. Outside, the snow continued to fall quietly through the harsh darkness. By the time he rose and looked out the window, their car had become a soft white hill on the edge of the street. Already his footprints on the driveway had disappeared.

He brushed the ashes from his hands and sat on the couch beside his wife, her feet propped up on the cushions, her slightly swollen ankles crossed, with a copy of _The Manner Born_ balanced on her belly. Absorbed, she licked her index finger absently each time she turned a page. Her hands were slender, her fingers long and graceful, she bit her bottom lip lightly, intently, as she read. Watching her, James felt a surge of love and wonder: that she was his wife, and their baby, due in just three weeks, would soon be born. Their first child, and they had been married just a year.

Norah looked up, smiling, when James tucked the blanket around her legs. "You know, I've been wondering what it's like." she said. "Before we're born, I mean. It's too bad we can't remember." She opened her dressing gown and pulled up the top she wore underneath, revealing her swollen belly that her husband had grown to love and cherish over the last few months. She ran her hand across it's smooth surface, the firelight playing across her skin, with not a stretch mark in sight. "Do you suppose it's like being inside an orb? Or a chinese lantern? The book says light permeates my skin, that the baby can already see."

"I don't know," James said. She laughed, that soft laugh that he could never get enough of. "Why not?" she questioned him. "You're the doctor."

"I'm just an orthopedic surgeon," he reminded her. "I could tell you the pattern for fetal bones, but that's about it." He lifted her foot, both delicate and swollen inside her light blue sock, and began to massage it gently. Her breathing filled the quiet room as her foot warmed in his hands, and he imagined the perfect, secret, symmetry of bones. In pregnancy, she seemed to him, beautiful but fragile. Fine blue veins faintly visible through her glowing skin.

It had been a smooth pregnancy, excellent in James' opinion, without medical restrictions. Even so, he had not been able to make love to her properly for several months. He found himself wanting to protect her instead, to carry her up flights of stairs, wrap her in blankets and bring her cups of tea. "I'm not an invalid." she protested each time, laughing. Still, she was pleased by his attentions. Sometimes he woke and watched her as she slept; the flutter of her eyelids, the slow even movement of her chest, her outflung hand, small enough that he could enclose it completely with his own.

The snow fell. For the next few hours, they read and talked. Sometimes she caught his hand and put it on her belly to feel the baby move or kick. From time to time, he got up to feed the fire, glancing out the window to see three inches of snow on the ground, then five or six. The street had gone quiet, with very few cars driving past.

At eleven, she rose and went to bed. He stayed downstairs, reading the latest issue of _The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery_. James was known to be a very good doctor, with a talent for diagnosis and a reputation for skillful work. He had graduated first in his class. Reading well past midnight, until the words shimmered senselessly on the crisp white pages, he tossed the journal onto the coffee table and got up to tend to the fire. Opening the damper fully and closing the brass fireplace screen. When he turned off the lights, shards of fire glowed softly through the layers of ash as delicate as the snow piled so high now on the porch railings and darkened bushes.

The stairs creaked with his weight. He paused by the nursery, studying the shadowy shapes of the crib, the stuffed animals and books arranged on the shelves. On impulse he went into the room and stood before the window, pushing aside the sheer curtain to watch the snow again, now nearly eight inches high on the lampposts, fences and roofs. It was the sort of storm that happened in Lexington, and the steady white flakes, the silence, filled him with a sense of excitement and peace. It was a moment when all the disparate shards of his life seemed to knit together, every past sadness and disappointment, every anxious secret and uncertainty hidden underneath the soft white layers. Tomorrow would be quiet, the world subdued and fragile.

He stood there for a long time, until he heard Norah moving quietly. He found her sitting on the edge of their bed, her head bent with her hands gripping onto the mattress. "I think this is it." she said, looking up. Her hair was loose, a strand caught on her lip. He brushed it back behind her ear. She shook her head as he sat beside her. "I don't know. I feel strange. This crampy feeling, it comes and goes." He helped her lie down on her side and then he laid down too, massaging her back. "It's probably just false labour." he assured her. "It's three weeks early, after all, first babies are usually late." This was true, he knew, he believed it as he spoke, in fact, he was so sure of it that after a time he drifted into sleep.

He woke up to find Norah standing over their bed, trying to shake his shoulder, Her dressing gown, her hair, looked nearly white in the strange snowy light that filled their bedroom.

"I've been timing them. Five minutes apart. They're strong, James. I'm scared."

He felt an inner surge then; excitement and fear tumbled through him like a tidal wave of emotion. But he had been trained to be calm in emergencies, to keep his emotions in check, so he was able to stand without any urgency, take the watch and walk with her, slowly and calmly, up and down the hall. When the contractions came, she squeezed his hand so hard he felt as if the bones in his fingers might snap. The contractions were exactly as she said, five minutes apart, then four. He took the bag from the closet, feeling numb suddenly with the momentousness of these events, long expected but a surprise all the same. He moved, as she did, but the world seemed to slow to stillness around them. He was acutely aware of every action, the way breath rushed against his tongue, the way her feet slid uncomfortably into the shoes she could still wear. When he took her arm he felt strangely as if he was suspended in the room, somewhere near the light fixture, watching them both from above, noting every nuance and detail: how she trembled with a contraction, how his fingers closed so firmly and protectively around her elbow. How outside, still, the snow was drifting down.

James helped his wife into her navy blue coat, which hung unbuttoned around her belly. He found the leather gloves he'd been wearing when he first saw her, too. It seemed so important that these details be right. They stood together on the porch for a moment, stunned by the soft world.

"Wait here," he said, and went down the steps, breaking a path through the drifts. The doors of their old car were frozen, and it took him several minutes to get one open. A white cloud flew up, glittering, when the door at last swung back, and he scrambled on the floor of the backseat for the ice scraper. When he emerged, Norah was leaning against a porch pillar, her forehead on her arms. He understood in that moment both how much pain she was in and that the baby was really coming, coming that very night.


	2. Chapter 2

James resisted the urge to go to his wife and, instead, put all his energy into freeing the car, warming one bare hand and then the other beneath his armpits when the pain of the cold became too great. Warming them but never pausing, brushing snow from the windshield and the windows, watching it scatter and disappear onto the soft sea of white around his calves.

"You didn't mention it would hurt this much," Norah said, when he reached the porch. He put his arm around her and helped her down the steps.

"I can walk," she insisted. "It's just when the pain comes."

"I know." James responded, but he did not let her go.

When they reached the car she touched his arm, and gestured to the house, veiled with snow and glowing in the darkness of the street. "When we come back we'll have our baby with us," she said. "Our world will never be the same."

The windshield wipers were frozen, and snow spilled down the back window when he pulled onto the street. He drove slowly, thinking how beautiful Lexington was, the trees and bushes heavy with snow.

"I called Jeremy before we left," he said, naming his colleague, an obstetrician. "I said to meet us in the office. We'll get there, it's closer."

Norah was silent for a moment, her hand gripping the dashboard as she breathed through a contraction. "As long as I don't have our baby in this old car," she managed at last, trying to joke. James smiled, but he knew her fear was real, and he shared it. Methodical, purposeful; even in an emergency he could not change his nature. He came to a full stop at every light, signaled turns onto the empty streets. Every few minutes, his wife braced one hand against the dashboard again and focused her breathing. Which made him swallow and glance sideways at her, more nervous this night than he could ever remember being. More nervous than on his wedding day, her family filling one side of the church, and on the other just a handful of his colleagues. His parents were dead, his sister too.

There was a single car parked in the clinic parking lot, the nurse's power-blue Fairlane, conservative and pragmatic and newer than James' own. He'd called her too. He pulled up in front of the entrance and helped Norah out. Now that they had reached the office safely, they were both exhilarated, laughing softly as they pushed the door into the bright lights of the waiting room.

The nurse met them. The moment James saw her, he knew something was wrong. She had large blue eyes in a pale face. It was now she gave them her news she was holding in: Jeremy's car had crashed on the unplowed country road where he lived, spun around on the ice beneath the snow and ended up in a ditch.

"You're saying he won't be coming?" Norah asked, anxious. The nurse nodded. She was so tall and thin it seemed like her bones might poke out from underneath her skin at any moment. Her large eyes were solemn and intelligent. For months, there had been rumors, jokes, that she was in love with James. He had dismissed them as idle office gossip, annoying but natural when a man and single woman worked in such close proximity.

"How about the emergency room?" she questioned. "Could you make it?"

James shook his head. The contractions were just a minute or so apart. "This baby won't wait," he said, looking at his wife. Snow had melted in her hair and glittered like a diamond tiara. "This baby's on it's way."

"It's alright," Norah said, stoic. Her voice was harder now, determined. "This will be a better story to tell him, growing up, him or her."

The nurse smiled, a line visible between her eyes, stopping on the bridge of her nose. "Let's get you inside then," she said softly. "I'll get you some help with this pain."

James went into his own office to find a coat, and when he entered Jeremy's examination room his wife was laying on the bed. Her legs parted. He went to the sink and washed his hands, feeling extremely alert. Aware of the tiniest details, as he performed this ordinary ritual, he felt his panic at Jeremy's absence begin to ease. He closed his eyes, forcing himself to focus on his task.

When he turned, the nurse approached him, "Everything looks fine. I'd put her at ten centimeters; see what you think."

He sat on the low stool, and reached up into the soft cave of his wife's body. The amniotic sac was still intact, and through it, he could feel the baby's head. His child. He should be pacing in a waiting room somewhere. Across the room, the blinds were closed on the only window, and as he pulled his hand from the warm of his wife's body he found himself wondering about the snow, if it was falling still, silencing the city and the land beyond.

"Yes," he announced. "Ten centimeters."

"Phoebe," his wife managed to say. He could not see her face, but her voice was clear. They had been discussing names for months and had still reached no decisions. "For a girl, Phoebe. And for a boy, Joseph. After my great uncle. Did I tell you this?" she asked. "I meant to tell you I'd decided."

"Those are good names," the nurse said, soothing.

"Phoebe and Joseph." James repeated, but he was concentrating on the contraction now rising in his wife's flesh. He gestured to the nurse who readied the gas for his wife. During his residency years, the practice had been to put the woman in labour out completely until the birth was over, but times had changed — it was 1964 — and Jeremy, he knew, used gas more selectively. Better that she should be awake to push; he would put her out for the worst contractions and the birth. His wife tensed and cried out, and the baby moved down.

"Now," James said, and the nurse put the mask in place. He watched his wife's hands relax, her fists unclenching as the gas took effect, and as she lay still, tranquil and unknowing, as another contraction moved through her.

"It's coming fast for a first baby," the nurse observed.

"Mm." James responded. "So far so good."

Half an hour passed this way. His wife roused and moaned, pushing when he felt she had had enough — or when she cried out that the pain was overwhelming — he nodded to the nurse who gave her more gas. Except for the quiet exchange of instructions, they did not speak. Outside the snow kept falling, drifting along the sides of houses, filling the roads. James sat on the stainless steel chair, narrowing his concentration to the essential facts. He had delivered five babies during medical school, all live births and successful, and he focused now on those, seeking in his memory of the details of care. As he did so, his wife, lying with her belly rising so high that he could not even see her face, became one with those other women. Her round knees, her smooth narrow calves, her ankles, all these were before him, familiar and beloved. Yet he didn't think to stroke her skin or put a reassuring hand on her knee. It was the nurse who held her hand while she pushed. To James, focused on what was immediately before him, she became not just herself but more than herself; a body like the others, a patient whose needs must be met with every technical skill he had.

It was necessary, more necessary than usual, for him to keep his emotions in check. As time passed, the strange moment he had experienced in their bedroom came to him again. He began to feel as if he were somehow removed from the scene of this birth, both there and also floating elsewhere, observing from some safe distance. He watched himself make the careful incision for the episiotomy. A good one, he thought, as the blood welled in a clean line, not letting himself remember the times he'd touched that same flesh in passion.

The baby's head crowned at last. In three more pushes it emerged, and the the body slid into James' waiting hands. The baby cried out, it's skin pinking up.

It was a boy.

Red-faced and dark-haired, his eyes alert, suspicious of the lights and the cold bright slap of air. James tied the umbilical cord and cut it.

_My son. _He allowed himself to think. _My precious little boy._

"He's beautiful," the nurse said, quietly. She waited while he examined the child, noting his steady heart, rapid and sure, the long fingered hands and shock of dark hair. Then she took the infant to the other room to bathe him and drop the sliver nitrate in his eyes. The small cries drifted back to them, and his wife stirred. James stayed where he was with his hand now on her knee, taking several deep breaths, awaiting the afterbirth.

"Where's our baby?" Norah asked, opening her eyes and pushing hair away from her flushed face. "Is everything alright?"

"It's a boy," James said, happily, smiling down at her. "We have a son, my love. You'll see him as soon as he's clean. He's absolutely perfect."

His wife's face, soft with relief and exhaustion, suddenly tightened with another contraction. James, expecting the afterbirth, returned to the stool between her legs, and pressed lightly against her abdomen. She cried out, and at the same moment he understood what was happening, as startled as if a window had appeared suddenly in a concrete wall.

"It's alright," he said. "Everything's fine. Nurse," he bellowed, as the next contraction tightened. She came in at once, carrying the baby, now swaddled in white blankets.

"He's nine on the Apgar," she announced. "That's very good."

His wife lifted her arms up to hold her baby and began to speak, but the pain caught her and she laid back down.

"Nurse?" James said, "I need you here. Right now." After a moment's confusion, the nurse quickly put two pillows down on the floor, placing the baby on the them, and joined the doctor by the table.

"More gas," he said. He saw her surprise and then her quick nod of comprehension as she complied. His hand was still on his wife's knee, he felt the tension ease from her muscles as the gas took hold again.

"Twins?" the nurse asked.

_Twins._


	3. Chapter 3

James, who had allowed himself to relax after the boy was born, felt shaky now, and he did not trust himself to do more than nod. _Steady. _He told himself as the next head crowned. _You're anywhere.. _he thought, watching from some fine point on the ceiling as his hands worked with method and precision. _This is any birth._

The baby was smaller, and arrived easily, sliding so quickly into his gloved hands that he leaned forward. Using his chest to make sure it didn't fall from his arms. "It's a girl," he said, and cradled her like a football, face down, tapping her back until she cried out. Then he turned her over to examine her front. Her blue eyes were cloudy, her hair jet black, but he barely noticed all this. What he was looking at was the unmistakable features, the eyes turned up as if with laughter, the flattened nose. _A classic case._

James felt transported back in time. His sister had been born with a heart defect and had grown very slowly, her breath catching and coming in little gasps whenever she tried to run. For many years, until that first trip to the clinic in Morgantown, they had not known what was wrong. Then they knew, and there was nothing they could do. All his mother's attention had gone to her, and yet she died when she was just twelve years old. James was sixteen, already living in town to attend high school, already on his way to Pittsburgh and medical school. To the life he was living now. Still, he remembered the depth and endurance of his mother's grief, the way she walked up the hill to the grave every morning, her arms folded firmly against whatever weather she encountered.

The nurse stood beside him and studied the baby. "I'm so sorry, Doctor," she said, sympathetically.

James held the infant, forgetting what he want to do next. Her tiny hands were perfect, but the gap between her big toes and the others that was there, undoubtedly, like a missing tooth. When he looked deeply into her eyes he saw the spots, tiny as flecks on snow on her irises. He imagined her heart, the size of a plum and very possibly defective. He thought of the nursery, so carefully painted, with it's soft animals and single crib. He thought of his wife, bent over standing on the sidewalk before their brightly veiled home, saying, _Our world will never be the same. _

The baby's hand brushed against his, and he started. Without violation, he cut the cord and checked her heart, her lungs. All the time he was thinking of the snow, Jeremy'silver car floating in the ditch, the deep quiet of his empty clinic. Later, when he considered this night — and he would think of it often, in the months and years to come; the turning point of his life, the moments around which everything else would always gather — what he would remember was the silence of the room and the snow falling outside. The silence was so deep and encompassing that he felt himself floating to a new height, above this room, and then beyond, where he was one with the snow. This would be what he remembers, that feeling of endless space.

"Alright, clean her up please," he said, releasing the slight weight of the infant into the nurse's arms. "But keep her in the other room. I don't want my wife to know. Not straight away." The nurse nodded. Disappearing into the other room, then to return with James' son to lift him into the baby carrier they'd brought. He was suddenly intent on delivering his wife's placenta, which came out beautifully as James expected. Fraternal twins, male and female, one visibly perfect and the other marked by an extra chromosome in every cell of her body. What were the odds of that?

His son lay in the carrier, his hands waving now and then, fluid and random like the quick motions James would feel him make inside the safety of his wife's womb. He injected her with sedative, then laid his wife down to repair the episiotomy. It was nearly dawn, light gathering faintly in the winter downs. He watched his hands move, thinking how well the stitches were going. And when he had finished, he found the nurse sitting in a rocker in the waiting room, cradling the baby girl in her arms. She met his gaze without speaking.

"There's a place," he said, writing the name and address on the back of a stray envelope. "I'd like you to take her there. When it's light, I mean. I'll issue the birth certificate, and I'll call to say you're coming."

"But your wife.." the nurse spoke, and he heard from a distant place, the surprise and disapproval in her voice. He thought of his sister, pale and thin, trying to catch her breath, and his mother turning to the window to hide her tears. "Don't you see?" he asked, his voice soft. "This poor child will most likely have a serious heart defect. A fatal one. I'm trying to spare us all terrible grief." He spoke with conviction, believing in every word. The nurse sat staring blankly at him, her expression surprised but otherwise unreadable, as he waited for her to say yes. In the state of mind he was in, it didn't occur to him that she'd say anything else. He didn't imagine, as he would later that night, and in many nights to come, the ways in which he was jeopardizing everything. The nurse studied him with her blue unreadable eyes. He returned her gaze, unflinching, and at last she nodded, a movement so slight as to be almost imperceptible.

"The snow," she murmured, looking down.

* * *

But by mid-morning the storm had begun to abate, and the distant sounds of plows grated through the still air. He watched from the upstairs window as the nurse knocked the snow from her powder-blue car and drove off into the soft white world. The baby was hidden, asleep in a box lined with blankets on the seat beside her. James watched her turn left onto the street and disappear. Then he went back to sit with his family.

Norah slept, her golden hair splayed across the pillow. Now and then, James dozed. Awake, he gazed into the empty parking lot, watching smoke rise from the chimneys across the street, preparing the words he would say. That it was no one's fault, that their daughter would be in good hands, with others like herself, with ceaseless care. hat it would be best this way for them all.

In the late morning, when the snow had stopped for good, his son cried out in hunger, his wife waking up automatically at the sound. "Where's our baby?" she said, rising up on her elbows, pushing her hair back from over her face. He was holding their son, warm and light, and he sat down beside her, settling the baby down in her arms.

"Hello, you," he said. "Look at our beautiful son. I'm so proud of you." She kissed her son's forehead, undoing her robe to put him to her breast. His son latched on at once, and his wife looked up and smiled. He took her free hand, remembering how hard she'd held onto him, imprinting the bones of fingers onto his flesh. He remembered how much he wanted to protect her. Then and now.

"Is everything alright?" she looked at her husband, the concerned look of worry on her face making him gulp. "Darling. What is it?"

"We had twins," he told her slowly, thinking of the shocks of dark hair, the slippery bodies moving in his hands. Tears starting to rise in his eyes. "One of each."

"Oh," she said. "A little girl too? Phoebe _and_ Joseph. But where is she?"

He thought how her fingers were so slight, like the bones of a little bird.

"Sweetheart," he began. His voice broke, and suddenly the words he had rehearsed so carefully had vanished. He closed his eyes, and when he could speak again, more words came, unplanned.

"Oh my love," he said. "I'm so sorry, our little daughter.. She died when she was born."


End file.
